Lloyd Wood and his colleagues argue in favor of breaking the "bent pipe" system architecture in which the satellite is seen as a relay point between two ground stations. They would add inter-satellite communication links and routers to decouple the up and downlink locations. -- Press, First Monday.

CLEO, the Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit, is a commercial Internet router launched into space and operated from orbit as a hosted payload onboard the UK-DMC(-1) satellite:

Here is material overviewing what CLEO is, how it was integrated into the UK-DMC satellite built by SSTL and launched into orbit, and how CLEO and UK-DMC imaging as part of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation were tested by an international collaboration of civil, commercial and military organisations in the United States, United Kingdom, and in Japan. That work with CLEO has been recognised with a number of awards and ceremonies.